Making Relationships Work

We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But it is also, of course, one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are as intense as those we experience in relationships. Viewed from the outside, love could be mistaken for a practice focused almost entirely on the generation of despair.

The problems begin because, despite all the statistics, we continue to think of love as an enthusiasm, rather than a skill that can be learnt. One of the gravest errors we make around relationships is to imagine that they aren’t things we can get wiser or better at.

In fact, as in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person, which is what this one-day workshop will help us to do. It will teach us to understand why we are all, in our different ways, tricky to be around and prone to sabotage love.

When difficulties strike in relationships, we often fall prey to the idea that it is the other person’s fault. The sadness must be someone’s fault: and, naturally enough, we conclude that the blame has to lie with our partner. We avoid the far truer, darker yet gentler possibility that this one-day workshop will help us to perceive: that we are trying to do something very difficult, which we need to learn to get better at.

Together, we bury the Romantic intuition-based view of relationships and learn to practice and rehearse our skills at love.

In Making Relationships Last we will learn:

That it is normal for love and sex to have a complex connection, and that they may not always belong together.

That we are all rather flawed, and accepting this can increase the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation.

That we will never find everything we need in another person, nor they in us - not because of these flaws, but because human nature makes this impossible.

That we need to make immense efforts to understand one another.

That intuition alone can’t get us to where we need to go.

In most relationships, we are trying to do something enormously difficult without the bare minimum of support necessary. It is not surprising that – very often – we have troubles. In this intensive day of study, we learn how to acquire skills and attitudes that can lead to a new, more hopeful future for love.

This one day workshop brings together the best of The School of Life’s Work curriculum into a single high intensity session. You can explore our full curriculum here. Please be aware, Making Relationships Work contains material from the following individual classes: How to Find Love, How to Make Love Last and Stay or Leave?

About One Day Workshops

Our intensive workshops provide an opportunity to work with leading members of our faculty over the course of a highly structured session.

Sessions are limited to 23 participants and will be based at The School of Life. Light refreshments and the corresponding workshop curriculum is included in the ticket price.

The School of Life Curriculum has been written, designed and quality assured by The School of Life HQ in London, led by Alain de Botton. Presented as an EQ learning journey, these 12 classes and 4 full-day workshops bring together over 10 years of teaching and continuous improvement of our emotional intelligence curriculum around the world.

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